Divine Injustice
by Queen of Dreaming
Summary: Fresh out of Wammy's House, Mello arranges to smuggle himself across a few borders. He doesn't expect the crew members to care about political theology, but they do.


**Written for crossovers_las on LiveJournal. Warnings for swearing (of course), implied character death, and brief mild allusions to underage sex. Note: I'm working with the manga version of _Death Note_ and the dubbed anime version of _Black Lagoon_ (through Season 2 at time of writing).**

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This is supposed to be the _easy_ part of the whole thing.

Mello is just figuring out the finer points of illegal travel, but he's doing all right so far. He's got himself a gun and an agreement with these people to get him, quietly, across a few national borders without questions, and now all he needs to do is sit here in this ancient boat until they arrive. It should be easy.

Of course, all of the crew members are shooting him these looks, every few seconds, like they think that when they aren't looking he's going to turn into a dead rat rotting his guts out among the beer cans on their floor. He didn't expect that part.

He stands, stretches expansively (and then regrets it; he probably shouldn't show off how weedy he is) and heads for the mini-fridge. They're criminals; they shouldn't have a problem with him drinking beer. It's not until he's bent over and mostly trying to figure out what they _eat_ (they can't live off beer, surely) that the contact, Rokuro, speaks up. "Kid. You're not a Kira supporter, are you?"

"What?" His voice shoots through about three registers as he twists around to gape at him. "Why the fuck would I be?"

"Routine check." Rokuro is looking straight at him, eyebrows cocked; the gunwoman (Revy, her name is Revy; keep track of names) is tapping a gun idly against the wall, but her head is tilted towards them. Listening.

"Why do you make your routine checks when you're halfway across the fucking ocean?" Mello snaps. (He's been swearing more lately. It's like switching into a local dialect.)

"Well," Revy says, "we want to be able to shoot your ass, don't we?"

He swallows twice, hard, as she lifts the tip of her gun and inspects it slowly. "Well, I fucking hate Kira." He would have said it anyway, of course, but the vitriolic honesty practically scalds his mouth on the way out.

"Good," she says, and the edge of the tension dulls; Mello realizes suddenly that she's staring at a couple of pictures tacked up on the wall, a couple of weedy flowers taped beneath them. The Polaroid shows her and the American pilot on either side of a big black guy in sunglasses who's chuckling at the camera; the other picture, faded ink on newsprint, shows a blonde woman in a long coat standing with her arms folded in front of a burnt-out shell of a bar. Huh.

Rokuro has relaxed a bit, but his eyes are still steely and flickering all over Mello. There's a bunch of potential reasons for that, ones the blond is willing to exploit in at least hypothetical circumstances, but he's already made his bargain here. "Bit unusual to see that on a Kira resistor," Rokuro says, jerking his chin at Mello's chest; Mello panics for a moment, glancing down at the tangle of leather and pale bare skin and _oh shit hypotheticals_ under the crucifix beads, but then Rokuro says "Different Gods, to you?"

Mello is surprised to find his fingers clenching protectively around the crucifix, ignoring the points digging into him. He thought he didn't care, that he'd left religion behind him at Wammy's, but apparently belief is like a cancer: it manifests unexpectedly. Right now he's just completely bone-deep furious that _anyone_ would conflate Kira and Christ, because the two have _absolutely nothing to do with each other,_ and who in hell would be stupid enough to think otherwise?

It passes, after a moment. He remembers that most people are stupid and all of them are assholes into the bargain, and Kira's distant careless mercilessness looks a lot like divine glory when you don't think about the meaty thunk of a corpse falling out of a chair in the back of a bar. He forces his fingers loose from the cross, ignores the red marks dug into his hand, and shrugs noncommittally. Just another one of Kira's crimes.


End file.
